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Chocolate raspberry crumble muffins

Annie Bell‘s Baking Bible is the most recent addition to my cookbook collection, courtesy of a birthday present from someone wonderful. I leafed through the book, marking each recipe I fancied trying soon, only to be left with a book that resembled a multicoloured hedgehog. Annie has too many tempting treats for me to try.

A lunch date with friends provided a good opportunity for trying out one of the recipes. I asked the lucky recipients to specify two ingredients that I should include; they chose chocolate (weirdly), and raspberries. What do you know?! Good old Annie had just the thing.

How it was to make:

Annie’s recipes are laid out really helpfully in the book, with details of the equipment needed as well as the ingredients. She seemed very keen on using a food processor, so I obeyed. This made things easier physically, but I don’t think that my actual kit is all that great. The crumble topping went way past breadcrumbs to something more like dough (over-mixing or butter not cold enough?). I am sure I could have done a better job by hand, and will do so next time.

The batter was really easy to make. I followed another recipe idea I’d seen and filled the cases halfway, then popped two whole raspberries in each before covering with the remaining batter.

The raspberry placement worked well, so every cake had a guaranteed fruity core. I think they could have done with one more each though.

I was proud to take these to lunch with me, and took extras for my friends’ other halves to try. The verdict was a unanimous thumbs up. Success!

Personal Progress:

Baking lessons learnt:

Things like crumble are often easier to do by hand. I think that what probably happened was that the heat generated by my amateurish food processor warmed the butter too much, leading to everything turning doughy. That sounds plausible.

Physical progress:

These were really easy, especially as I didn’t need to do much hand mixing.

As I had bought the ingredients in advance in a fit of organisation, I was able to just whip these up in the morning before going to lunch, like some sort of domestic goddess (who leaves a trail of icing sugar, washing up and edible decorations in her wake).